Dictionary of Literary Biography on Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith has a historical place in Canadian letters as the first published native-born poet. His poem The Rising Village (1825) is the first extended treatment in verse of the difficulties encountered by settlers in what are now the Maritime Provinces and of the development of colonial village life. As a response and a sequel to his namesake and great-uncle's The Deserted Village (1770), it presents contrasts with the decaying life of the Old World but in doing so offers ironies, not all of them conscious, and complexities of its own. Recent critical studies have shown it to be a far more interesting poem than literary history had previously acknowledged.
Third son and ninth child of Henry Goldsmith, an Irish-born Loyalist officer, Oliver was born in St. Andrew's, New Brunswick. Following a fire that destroyed their property near that town, Henry moved with his family in 1896 first to Annapolis Royal and then to Halifax, where he had secured a post as assistant commissary. (The commissariat was a civilian department of the British Army charged with providing regiments with food, fuel, forage, and quarters.)
Educated at home, Oliver by 1808 had been placed by his father in five successive occupations with a view to launching him on a suitable career. These included jobs at the Naval Hospital in Halifax, an ironmonger's shop, a bookseller's, a law office, and a wholesaler's business in Boston. Following these apprenticeships, he was sent to the Halifax Grammar School, where he remained till his father secured him a post in the commissariat in 1810.
Oliver Goldsmith served in the commissariat for forty-five years, retiring in 1855 with the rank of assistant commissary general. His service included twenty-three years in Halifax, eleven in Saint John, four in Hong Kong, five in St. John's, Newfoundland, and one in Corfu. These periods of service were broken twice by short intervals on half pay.
In 1822 the Garrison Amateur Theatre opened in Halifax. Goldsmith was involved with it from the start, playing the part of Tony Lumpkin in his forebear's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and composing an address in heroic couplets for the opening of the theater. His career as a poet began with this effort and culminated in 1825 with the publication in London of The Rising Village.
The poem, consisting of some six hundred lines in heroic couplets, is a response to and continuation of The Deserted Village. Early in the poem, Goldsmith invokes the spirit of his great-uncle, and throughout there are echoes and allusions that point up contrasts between the old and the new. The poem moves from the rugged conditions the settlers found on arrival, through the subduing of the wilderness and the Indians, to an extended portrayal of village life. Goldsmith does not appear to have shared his namesake's distrust of mercantilism and individual enterprise, but he does introduce into his idyll elements of disorder and vice to make his picture truer. Over a hundred lines are devoted to the narrative of Flora and Albert, a pathetic story of broken vows, which, though it mitigates the poem's prevailing optimism, by no means dispels it altogether. Although the poem's graceful couplets lack the warmth, richness, and fine modulation of the older poem's verse, they do speak eloquently and at times vividly, particularly in the depiction of village types and institutions. Recent critical studies have shown that the poem is not as simple as it appears and that if studied in close conjunction with The Deserted Village it reveals ironies and ambivalences its creator may not have been conscious of when composing.
Following a discouraging reception of his first published effort, Goldsmith wrote little verse. In 1834 a second volume appeared, containing in addition to a slightly shortened version of The Rising Village eighteen largely occasional pieces. These show Goldsmith's skill in the handling of various verse forms and in eloquent, if conventional, expression.
Upon his retirement in 1855 Goldsmith made his home with his surviving sister in Liverpool, England. There he died in 1861, leaving among his papers a short and largely accurate autobiography.
Oliver Goldsmith has a secure place in Canadian letters and not just a historical one. His achievement in The Rising Village was a modest one. The poet's own modesty speaks in the voice and gives the poem its charm, but the poem rewards close study as a truly fine expression of life and attitudes in its time.
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